The original TOS Enterprise...

[knightgrace]

Okay, here is the problem, both in universe, and the real world.

In universe, the Enterprise is the result of two centuries of starflight development. Two centuries plus (Nomad reference? Of Independent logic. The implications are that Independent Logic capable computers aren't that much more capable than a human, and most likely less capable than a qualified human professional grade. In other words, a human professional has a higher level of understanding than a machine, with the typical example that a common human being greater than a common Independent Logic... quantitatively I am not sure just how much help is provided to the average individual human. But logic argues that it must be good enough to meet everyday common needs, otherwise, why use it for anything?

Let us say that before Duotronics, was around, the predecessor system, could be a helpful assistant to a Master of whatever ( Science, Law, medicine, philosophy, and so on), but inferior to the particular human. Duotronics took it up to Doctoral level.

Such that the Constitution class didn't precisely evolve as one would expect, but was going from one step to another. Why wasn't it evolved? Too few steps.

But why in universe was the Star Trek Phase II Enterprise the way that it was? Too few steps, remember?

Now here is the real problem: the Enterprise-D. Too radical for the number of steps. If your computers are barely capable, then how do you get to the Enterprise-D, so soon?

It isn't logical.

Now for the real world.

When Matt Jeffries, was working on the design of the Enterprise, he went through, it is said thousands of drawings. In other words actual evolution.

 

[Dukhat]

If you could describe this ‘problem’ in one sentence, what would you say?

 

[knightgrace]

Two hundred years and that is what they came up with?

All of the computer advances, virtual nothing.

Matt Jeffrey's in a matter of months came up with that???

Under the direction of Gene Roddenberry et el -> forced evolution in the real world case.

Twiddling thumbs in terms of technology in the fictional case.

Consider that they had Nomad technology for sixty years and little was done.

Now look at the Advancement of the past six years...in the real world.


Major disconnect here

 

[Ithekro]

How?

There were no personal computers in 1964. Those didn't really start to appear until the 70s. Nomad was a fusion of a human probe and an alien probe that was probably more advanced. Nomad itself wouldn't be much more advanced than the Voyager space probes in those days writing.

Computer technologies leaps and bounds didn't start happening until a decade or two later, so the writers wouldn't know. That they happened on what would closely resemble early 21st century computers for the 23rd century is mindly amazing and somewhat dependent on inventors seeing Star Trek and going, "how do I make that"?

Sci-fi of the 1950s to 1970s had humans advance in space design and interplanetary colonization. Instead we had the computer be revolutionized and space languished after the 1980s Challenger disaster.

 

[David cgc]

Real life isn't a game of Civilization. There isn't some technology tree that neatly leads from a to b to c to d at x-number of years per step. Advances occur when people happen to get the idea or when prerequisitics and surrounding conditions call for them.

For the former, two millenia ago, a few dozen years and a few dozen miles separated two natural philosophers, one of whom speculated that disease might be caused by organisms too small for the eye to see attacking the inside of the body, and the other of whom noted that curved baubles of glass had a magnifying effect when you looked through them, which was dismissed as a useless curiosity. Now, if those people had been a bit closer, so that someone who had the idea of these tiny illness-causing animals happened to look through a curved piece of glass comparing a clean water source to a tainted one, we could've had the germ theory of disease and the fundamentals of modern sanitation in the first century B.C., something that would've radically altered human history. On the other hand, if the doctors who were offended by the concept that their dirty hands were spreading illness had their way and successfully suppressed the germ theory, we still might not have it today.

As for the latter, think about modern computing. In the middle of last century, computing hardware was too large and cumbersome, so the dominant model was one central "main frame" accessed by individual operators though numerous "terminals." The technology miniaturized, and we shifted to a personal computer model, where all of the computing hardware is located within the individual terminal. In the '90s, there were attempts to shift back to a mainframe model, using the internet rather than having the user and the server have to be in the same facility, referred to as "network computing," but the technology wasn't there yet. It wasn't until the 21st century and high-speed, and more importantly, cellular internet that the network computer model became common again, except now we call it "the Cloud" and our individual "terminals" are (or can be) capable of fulfilling most computing needs locally. Except now we've got large language and visual diffusion models which take too much time or memory to run locally, so those have to be run on extremely powerful servers that are heavily subsidized by companies hoping the technology will eventually become, if not useful, then somehow profitable.

The behind-the-scenes info on TOS suggests they use an obsolete model of computing; Spock's station is said to be the "library computer console," suggesting that none of the other control panels on the bridge can look up information from the ship's database, and when they do, they usually carry data disks; on the other hand, we don't know what kind of constraints they're operating under. There could be important practical reasons to keep the ship's systems firewalled; PADDs with critical documents might be hand-delivered to ensure chain-of-custody and prevent man-in-the-middle or phishing attacks where false or misleading documents are delivered electronically with no confirmation that they came from where they claim.

 

[Firebird]

But why in universe was the Star Trek Phase II Enterprise the way that it was? Too few steps, remember?

There's nothing "in-universe" about the Phase II Enterprise since the series was never made.

 

[knightgrace]

How?

There were no personal computers in 1964. Those didn't really start to appear until the 70s. Nomad was a fusion of a human probe and an alien probe that was probably more advanced. Nomad itself wouldn't be much more advanced than the Voyager space probes in those days writing.

Computer technologies leaps and bounds didn't start happening until a decade or two later, so the writers wouldn't know. That they happened on what would closely resemble early 21st century computers for the 23rd century is mindly amazing and somewhat dependent on inventors seeing Star Trek and going, "how do I make that"?

Sci-fi of the 1950s to 1970s had humans advance in space design and interplanetary colonization. Instead we had the computer be revolutionized and space languished after the 1980s Challenger disaster.

Please remember that computer technology in the real world was driven by military necessity. What this meant as mentioned by you and the next post down is the incredible shrinkage of the computer.

The AN/FSQ-7 of the 1950s occupied some 2,000 square meters of floor space. Two of them were in each SAGE installation. Why two? In case the prime unit went down and couldn't be broken back online fast enough. Furthermore, they had young women on roller skates going up and down the isles just to change out vacuum tubes - fast. With the total number of tubes involved, at least one was always burning out. Reliable computing technology had to he developed.
Another example: the North American A-5A Vigilante made use of the first transistoraised digital computer in an aircraft for navigation, and the first ones burned out in fifteen minutes or so...

Now about "Independent Logic ", I don't think that this was true Artificial Intelligence, but somewhere close to it. It is the difference between Siri and non speaking simple computers. Not quite able to make the leap into full blown A. I. But good enough to affect some change. But here's the problem where the extensions to this technology?

What happens to put it another way, when you combine Independent Logic and Computer Aided Design?


Let's look at Xerox Park. It invented the Graphical User Interface. Which Apple Computers brought to light ten years later in the Apple Macintosh...

In order to totally replace Windows and GUIs completely, just how good does an Independent Logic have to be???

Such that in early twenty-first century...

 

[Ithekro]

Basically the envisioned possible advancements in computers as seen in the early-mid 60s was centuries down the road, not thirty years for much of it, and being past much of it six decades after the first pilot was filmed. That was unforeseen. Some radical stuff happened in the last quarter of the century, followed by even more stuff in the first quarter in the new century. More than the writers could account for in their fictional writings.

 

[knightgrace]

Unforeseen? Moore's law.

The affects of Moore's law couldn't be determined entirely before hand. Still can't.

What is holding up progress now is heat...
For some strange reason silicon sublimates away above about five gigahertz clock speed. Yes, you can cool it - overclockers do this routinely.

Then there was the MIT Oxygen Project, that attempted to put 1024 twenty megahertz 32 bit CPUs on one chip. That is, if I remember correctly 1024 Intel 80386 CPUs using reconfigurable wiring between them under software control. Power requirements nixed this.

But the 1960s image of the future of computing was very limited in nature...Arthur C. Clarke in his 1963 non fiction book 'Profiles of the Future' went into the ways and wherefores of technological development.

Make no mistake about it Star Trek is a fascinating take on a possible future.

But Nomad, depending on just how capable it was supposed to be, is a Star Trek deal breaker.

Let's hypothesis on the original capability of Nomad. Independent Logic - check , no wait, exactly what is meant by "Independent Logic"? Something between what was, and what was wanted. I want to say a self programming computer, but maybe not entirely. In other words some fundamental incompleteness to it. Yes it would make lives easier, but just how much easier? Assuming ( warning about assuming) a 16 bit minicomputer, as a starting point...what would a 32 bit Mainframe be like?

 

[yotsuya]

Technology ebbs and flows. Just look at the last 200 years. 1800 we had sailing ships and wagons. 1900 we had steam ships and rail roads. 2000 we have nuclear ships, bullet trains, electric cars, and especailly planes.

Events often dictate what happens. The perfection of the steam engine in the 19th century was a game changer, but the next one to come along was the internal combustion engine which led to cars and planes. We toyed with steam cars and electric cars, but they didn't catch on. An actually the key development of the Toyota Hybrid was the diesel locomotive (electric drive train), which an inventor applied to a car in the 70's, but no one made use of it until after 2000. And we went from being grounded to landing on the moon in 66 years. And take fast jets. The SR-71 was designed in the 50's and grounded in the 90's and we still don't have a known jet aircraft that can reproduce its flights. Politics can slow things down or speed things up.

In the Star Trek universe, they built in a civilization collapse in the mid 21st century. This gives them all the leeway they need. For instance, what rocket lauched Cochrane's first warp drive ship? The Titan which is an ICBM dating from the 50's and used for NASA's Gemini missions in the 60's.

Planes advanced due to war. 1903 to 1914 and then 1918 to 1939. And we put them on ships and created the aircraft carrier, but it wasn't until the 4th one that we acctually designed one from the ground up. And we learned a few things in WWII and resurected an accidental feature from the 2nd and 3rd converted designs for the first post war carriers. And the Nimitz class has been in service for 50 years and the Ford class isn't too different in disign. Things that work tend to get kept around.

So the deisgn liniage of the Enterprsie (and in saying this I am ingoring everthing in the streaming era) follows a logical pattern. The Romulan War follows on the tail end of Enterprise, Then there is a Klingon war in there and a Klingon Cold War and then a new Romulan threat in TOS. As we have seen in our cold war, that has pushed technology. So the desing progression following such a cold war makes a lot of sense. Bigger and with families changes the entire purpose of the ship and the mission so the design should be different and incorporate those changes.

 

[Unicron]

I recall Geordi commenting in "Relics" that a lot of the essential technology on his Enterprise, and the basic operating principles behind it, hadn't really changed all that much from Scotty's era. Certainly there had been some evolution and improvement in many systems, but not that radically different.

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